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Fighting Mosquito-borne Diseases

Leading up to the 2016 summer Olympics in Brazil, Zika virus ravaged South America, and photos and videos of patients haunted the news worldwide. A year later, Zika has fallen out of conversation in the United States, but not so for the rest of the world.

At Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health, researchers Nicole Achee and John Grieco study Aedes aegypti and its role in mosquito-borne diseases. Over the past 20 years, the biology professors’ work has taken them around the globe to Indonesia, Peru, Suriname, Thailand, Uganda and Belize and has advanced understanding of how mosquitoes and other insects spread infectious diseases and led to better strategies to curtail disease outbreaks.